Forearm tattoo of an ornamental animal skull with dotwork swirls, surrounded by red poppies and buds in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skull and poppies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A horned animal skull is the central motif, shaded with fine dotwork and decorated with black scrolling swirls and filigree. Red and pink poppies, buds and leaves wrap around the skull and climb towards the elbow, with a thin black line running along the top of the arm. The black and grey skull contrasts with the warm red flowers, and the design follows the curve of the forearm.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Skull Animal skull Poppy Flower Bud Leaves Swirl Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up the Harker shaft in a tub of slack on a Tuesday in March. It was a ram's skull, horns curled tight as fern fronds, and it had no business five hundred feet under the Pelton seam. The banksman, Gil Ordway, swore it had been looking at him. Nobody would touch it, so they tipped it onto the spoil heap, where the first poppies were already pushing red through the grey shale, and went home to their tea.

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Old Sadie Rook, who laid out the dead for half the valley, walked up the heap that evening with a bucket of water and a bent knife. She scraped the bone clean and picked the grit from the eye sockets. Then she wove wild poppies round it stem by stem, because her mother had said anything brought up from underground wanted flowers on it before it could be let lie. After that the men touched their caps passing the heap, and the poppies came thicker that summer than anyone could recall.

In October the water broke into the low workings and eleven men were cut off at the face. The rescue crew dug from the top for four days. On the fifth morning Ordway sat by the heap with his flask, as he had every morning since March, and saw the poppies on the skull's brow had gone over in the night. Their petals lay on the shale in a red ring, and every stalk leaned downslope toward the engine house, the way a dog leans toward a door it wants opened.

Ordway fetched the foreman and they followed the stalks. Where the ground dipped they found a crack breathing cold air, and beyond it a dry gallery where the eleven men sat huddled and alive. On Sunday Ordway set the skull on the chapel step, flowers and all, and every man who came up from the pit touched the bone between its horns before he went home.